


Corpsey Diem

by atomicsupervillainess



Series: Corpsey Verse [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Academy Era, BUT NOT NEARLY AS SCANDALOUS AS DISINTERRING A BODY!, Comedy, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluffy as hell, Grave-Robbing Corpse-snatchers Fitzsimmons, It's Halloween bitches!, Sassy proto-feminism, Talk of crappy victorian medical sciences, Time for crack!fic!, and also hilarity, articulating skeletons, because PRANKS, because that's really the only way to romance, cruel pun-making Jemma, lets be honest here, long-suffering Fitz, mildly gross?, scandalous ankles!, victorian au, victorian romancin' with corpses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-06
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-25 05:18:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4948153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atomicsupervillainess/pseuds/atomicsupervillainess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the Victorian academy era, grave-robbing, body-snatching AU you never knew you wanted! Happy Halloween!</p><p>When Miss Simmons and Mr. Fitz began their late night lovers stroll along the foggy London streets, he did not believe for a moment that the were actually going to disinter a body. What no one told him, and what perhaps, that young man should have guessed (being betrothed to that young woman), was that belief quails under the singular determination of Miss Simmons, and that, by the end, he would find himself sneaking amidst the shadows with a body in tow, all for hopes of a kiss, stolen by moonlight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Corpsey Diem

**Author's Note:**

  * For [notthestupidcatagain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/notthestupidcatagain/gifts), [khatijahabdulsalam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/khatijahabdulsalam/gifts).



> I've had this fic idea bopping around in my head pretty much all summer, and finally, FINALLY!!! It's October, season of jack'o'lanterns, mini-candy bars, b-movie horrors, courdoroy, cardigans, skeletons, spooks, and HALLOWFRIGGINWEEN so buckle-up my lovelies for the most ridiculous halloween inspired crack!fic I've ever written (shhhhh, I know it's the *only* one, but we can pretend!) and please, enjoy the ride!
> 
> Shoutouts to khatijahabdulsalam and notthestupidcatagain for reading and laughing, and to Notapepper, who gchatted with me as I came up with some of the dialogue, and much of the details, and then so graciously beta'd it for me! She is the Burke to my Hare, the skeleton to my grave, the jack to my lantern the ----you get the idea... ;-)

 

* * *

 

“I’m sure we can simply tell the nice constables that it was my wandering womb,” Simmons declared, tucking her side closer to Fitz’s elbow. “That is - if they they should so desire to know why two young lovers are strolling about on a foggy London night.”

Fitz scoffed loudly in disbelief, lowering his head to whisper harshly in her ear, “ _Simmons!_ You of all people - lyin’ to the London constabulary! T’is _not_ a lovers’ stroll on a London night!”

Jemma pouted, her lower lip precariously full. “Is it not?” Her voice was laced with a teasing tone.

“ _It’s a suspicious and furtive scurryin’ abou’ in a graveyard! With shovels hidden in m’great coat!_ ” He hissed, “An’ how can a _womb_ wander? Where’s it wanderin’ to?”

“ _Exactly!_ ” Jemma crowed - Fitz humbled her with a quietous look. “Exactly,” she continued in hushed tones. “The codswallop they’re peddling as medical expertise these days is just disappointing, to say the least - in an age when we have discovered electromagnetic induction, where the engineering sciences are galloping apace -”

Fitz grinned smugly, straightening his shoulders and puffing out his chest.

“And the medical sciences are _still_ in the dark ages, claiming the ridges on one’s skull can declaim intelligence and character! It’s pure hocus-pocus _nonsense_ , honestly Fitz.”

She poked him in his ticklish side. Shying from her with a skipping step, he struck his gloved hands to his hips, and pointed a finger at her. “That’s no way to treat your future husband, young lady-”

“You’re as young as _I_ am, you great dolt.”

“-who _happens_ to be carryin’ _all_ the shovels and collection jars, I’ll thank you to remember, _y’harpy_ ,” he grumbled, gingerly stepping around a tumbled headstone. “I’ve been too lenient with you,” he declared, shaking his head and looking to the heavens. “Too lenient by half. I’ve done it now, all this education - it has turned your brain, I’m afraid to think. You’ll be intractable. Absolutely _intolerable_ -”

“Balderdash. You wouldn’t have me any other way. And they’re trowels. I made a thorough examination of the graveyard just yesterday. The undertaker’s shed has shovels and a large tarpaulin - and I am carrying the rope. It is not as though one was merely employed as a pack-mule, you know,” Jemma insisted, traipsing blithely along the the rows of uneven stones. She clutched her dark silk in her hands, the frothy, lacy folds of her petticoats peeking out with every step, revealing fleeting glimpses of her delicate ankles in the gaslight.

Fitz pulled a little at the tightness of the cravat tied about his neck, and gulped, feeling his face flush as he observed the tiny flashes of skin at her wrists and her long white throat, where the ribbons of her bonnet caressed. He, fleetingly, imagined how it might be his hands caressing that delicate column in the wee hours of morning, once their unpleasant task was finished - as a reward, of course, for his assistance. He was her fiancé after all. It might be looked at askance, if they were found out, of course; however, the Royal Shield Academy of Sciences was a very forward thinking and liberal place - why, they even let women study!

He jogged forward. It would not do to have her escape his sight, even if it meant scurrying through the gaslit fog, under the clutch of autumnal branches which grasped forward horridly, like long, skeletal hands, throwing shadows against the curling mists and sending shivers crawling like spiders up his spine.

He was going to commit grand larceny.

Not only was he going to commit grand larceny, said larceny was to be a body. A dead body. A putrid, decaying, dead body. _From a grave_. That he was going to dig up with the love of his life.

He was going to dig up a dead body, wrap it up in tarpaulin, and take it back to the Royal Shield Academy so that his future wife could improve her medical dissection and pathology skills.

“Right.” He nodded to himself, his feet clattering to a stop. “This has been a good decision.”

Simmons’ bonnet had loosened, bouncing merrily against her back as her glossy dark curls fell prettily against the apples of her cheeks. She had turned back, an encouraging and flirtatious smile unfurling. She crooked her finger at him, nibbling at the edge of her pink bottom lip, just as he was so deeply desirous to do. Fitz had to physically stop himself from gathering her up right then and pressing her scandalously into a grove of fir trees, where their actions could be hidden from God and anyone.

“Following, Fitz?” She stretched out a gloved hand for him.

“By God, _yes_ ,” he breathed, tripping towards her, clasping her hand in his and bringing her knuckles to his lips. He declared passionately, “I’d follow you anywhere you dared go, my love.”

* * *

 

“I take it back,” Fitz declared, wretching. “I take it _all_ back.” He pressed the back of his hand against his whitened lips, trying to stop the sudden, nauseating slosh of his stomach contents against the back of his throat. “It’s just like the -”

“-not the stupid cat again, Fitz!”

“You left it’s liver next to my lunch!” he cried out, scrambling out of the deep, muddy hole, his rolled shirtsleeves sodden with mud and dirt up to the shoulder.

“But I did _bring_ you lunch!” she countered, holding up a jar of viscous liquid, coloured something like dirty dishwater.

“You had the academy footman bring me lunch. There is a _difference_!” he huffed, wiping a hand on his trousers as he leaned forward to grab the outstretched jar.

“But Koenig was happy to help! And it’s _really_ the thought that matters, isn’t it?” she insisted from the disinterred grave, heaving the body’s legs with a great shove over the side.

Fitz danced away from the corpsey feet (one was missing a shoe! _a shoe!_ ) only to slip suddenly in the wet. The jar of thick, mucus-like liquid splattered against his cravat and waistcoat in heavy, smelly glops.

“ _Simmons!_ ” he cried, clawing at it and mewling, distraught, “There’s _GOOP!_ ”

He began to hyperventilate, his mouth upturned into a distressed grimace. “There is goop _all over_ my cravat, Simmons!”

“Oh Fitz,” Jemma sighed in a tone beset with both endearment and bedevilment. “You silly man. I told you not to wear a cravat to a body-snatching, did I not, dearest? Did I not suggest, _very pointedly_ , that perhaps a smock was in order?”

“ _I DIDN’T THINK WE’D ACTUALLY GO THROUGH WITH IT!_ ”

"Pathology is a fascinating field and will enhance our understanding of medicine and the human body in inestimable ways, but to do so, we need medical dissection, and because of all these silly little religious notions, and bloody awful laws, the human animal does not fully understand how its own body functions! I aim to change that, Fitz, and you're here to help me," Jemma declared fiercely.

His bride-to-be crawled, slipping out of the pit of the grave, with her smock covered from tip to tail in bodily fluids and mud. “What on earth, by heaven, did you think we were _actually_ going to do?” She quirked a confused eyebrow at him as she began shovelling dirt back into the grave.

“I thought that -” Fitz bit his tongue, colouring heavily. He was suddenly thankful for the lateness of the hour, and the depth of the darkness surrounding them. “-that _erm_ , ah, that _is_ , I -erm, I had _hoped_ \- no, I had _antici_ -, well, not _exactly_ , so much as _inferred_ , that _erm_ -”

“Spit it out, Fitz.”

“ _Kissin’_? An’ maybe some pettin’? Y’know, romance? _Maybe_? I mean, it was - _I was, obviously_ , erm, ah, mistaken…”

Jemma’s smile was soft as she leaned her cheek against the handle of her shovel. “Oh you dear, sweet, wonderfully daft, darling man. _Of course_ we were going to dig up a body. But that doesn’t mean some love making is not in order. Why, one _might_ declaim verses as one assists one’s dainty and frail fiancée in replacing grave dirt, mightn’t one?”

“One might,” Fitz agreed, suddenly on his feet, quickly scrambling for his forgotten shovel. “...And, _erm_ , the _uh_ , the um... _kissin’_?” he inquired, suddenly shy.

“Just as soon as we’ve finished defiling poor Jeremiah Dodd’s final resting place.”

“Right, right,” Fitz agreed. “O’ course.” He moved swifter than Simmons would have warranted.

Her lascivious eyebrow peaked, watching the way his muscles worked beneath the sweat drenched, dirty shirtsleeves. It was as if he were no stranger to base labouring, she thought, eagerly taking in how the muscles in his arms bunched and flexed, how his thighs and gluteus strained against the tightness of his trousers, making her heart beat ponderously, and a steady heat billow like a furnace in her core.

Oh yes, there would be kissing.

And possibly a study of the kinetic movement of the human body, following this. He would of course, need to be unclothed for such observations. She licked her lips in a predatory movement. It was really too bad their wedding was a whole horrid month away. With one last libidinous glace, she tore her eyes away and tried to return her mind to task.

* * *

 

"I don't know if I'll be able to eat after all the goop..." Fitz whined, wrinkling his nose with distaste as he patted the sod back into place.

"Oh, dear silly _Fitz_. You'll be _fiiiine_. I'll give you plenty of time to recover - I do promise. Why, _I can't wait_ to get him back and cut him up a little bit, pull back the tissues -" Simmons recounted gleefully, tugging the rope tight along the tarpaulin.

"I think I'm going to be sick."

"Away from the cadaver, please. I’d prefer an uncontaminated specimen - oh!” Simmons exclaimed suddenly, yanking Fitz away from the grave site.

He looked positively green when he glared at her. “It’s only that it would be quite rude to vomit upon someone's eternal resting place, wouldn’t it, Fitz? Your mother would be so perturbed."

"MY MOTHER! _WHA' ABOUT YOURS_!?" Fitz whisper-shouted, stumbling behind the headstone to wretch violently. Once the heaving noises subsided and his shoulders ceased shaking, he felt something very like a finger prodding him in his ribs. He had not vomited, but far be it for Simmons to know it. Why, as his near-bride, her concern should be almost solely focused on sympathizing with his ordeal!

“Fitz?” Simmons called, from farther behind than he would have anticipated, given the closeness of her finger.

He turned, and gave a high-pitched scream of alarm. “ _Simmons!_ ” he reprimanded, aghast, smacking the skeletal hand away from his side with his soiled cravat. “ _How could you_?!”

Jemma cackled, pleased.

“ _Oh come on Fitz_! It’s just a silly prank!” she managed to chuckle. “And besides, Old Jeremiah is concerned for your health, why just look at his _expression_!” Simmons teased, punctuating her finished sentence by articulating the corpse’s rotting limbs against its chin in a pantomime of ‘the Thinker’.

He glared meanly at his intended. “I _will_ properly have this debt paid, you’ll see! A _grand_ prank - somethin’ extraordinarily inventive. You won’t even see it comin’.” He shook his finger at her, leaning close to her face in an effort to be intimidating. It mostly recalled an image of a puppy, having caught its reflection in a mirror for the first time, growling.

Jemma reached out the corpse’s skeletal hand (the skin having sloughed off sometime after death, but before their midnight resurrection) and pretended to pet him with it. "Oh, do cheer up, sunshine."

Fitz’s eyes narrowed. He leaned in even closer, inches from her gleeful face. He would not flinch.

“Chin up, pup," A skeletal finger tucked under his whiskered chin.

He was determined to show no sign of weakness amidst such torturous torments as his Love would devise. Why, he was soon to be a member of the Queen’s own Royal Shield, an espionage agency for only the most daring, the most brave!

“ _Do. Your. Worst._ ” he insisted, his mouth scrunching with the effort not to whimper or whine.

A slightly manic grin started to form on Jemma’s wide mouth, creasing into deep dimples. Her eyes twinkled mischievously as she stroked the skeletal hand along Fitz’s cheek. "You're not dead yet, pet."

She twisted away suddenly, the corpse falling in a clatter of limbs and digits, to smother her delighted peels of laughter in the voluminous folds of her stiff silk skirts. "... _I speak from experience_!"

She broke down into a gleeful riot of giggle-snorts. It was so summarily ridiculous and endearing an image that young master Fitz could not halt the transformation of his vastly disapproving features into an expression of pure love.

It was mere moments, he proudly told himself, in the days that followed this episode, before he schooled his features into a mask of righteous anger. “Why, by heaven, do I have to be so _bloody blasted in love with you_?”

He huffed, shoving the corpse into the tarpaulin and fighting the grin that split his face, watching as Simmons’ laughter suddenly turned to wheezes - it was not that she was not laughing as hard as previous, simply that, tight-laced in her corset as she was, her lungs could not contain the necessary amount of air to sustain her shrieks and peals of effervescent laughter.

She slapped her hand upon the sodden ground in some vain attempt to return to breathing normally, but, if it was all the payment he would receive on the debt she owed him for his services tonight, he would take it in full.

"What wrongs have I committed _so grave_ that I deserve such a wife!?" He hissed in her ear, his eyebrows pulling low and his frown marked. It was difficult, but he had managed to tamp down the smile that fought for purchase.

“ _Stolen a bo-bo-oODY_?!” she shrieked, pressing her face against his forearm where he leaned beside her, watching her sides shake fiercely in laughter.

“ _Miss Jemima Simmons_!" He gasped theatrically, leveraging her to sitting, holding her up as she fought for composure, “I can’ believe you’ve made me carry a _goopy corpse_ , and _then_ used i’ as a prop for _teasin’_ me! You are truly the oddest woman I have _ever_ met!”

Jemma’s eyes widened even further, her face flushed a deep red, and she let out one more breathless peel of laughter, collapsing against his chest. He did not protest when she stayed, pressed against his unbuttoned shirt, stroking at the thin material, and feeling his heart thump against his chest. His breath hitched, to feel her warmth so near, and he thought, off-hand, that perhaps, unbuttoning his soiled waistcoat was not the optimal choice when cradling one’s beloved to one’s chest, especially when one was attempting, desperately, to not ravage them silly near a recently disinterred corpse.

Suddenly, it seemed to Fitz, Jemma was recovered, and using his shoulders to lever herself to standing. "Well I couldn't carry him myself, could I?" she reasoned.

“ _Why_? Why do I _ever_ agree? It’s the same every time, not simply passing strange, _noooooo -_ ”

"- for the novelty of my company, and the excitement our outings always afford -  and soon we'll be married and you'll have to carry corpses for me _MUCH_ more often."

“As your future husband, I’m afraid I _simply must insist_ that you _desist_ from these criminal endeavours!” he hissed, grabbing one end of the tarpaulin roll as she grabbed the other.

"I hardly think you'd like me coming out to the cemetery at night _ALONE_ , Fitz!  Who else should I have brought with me?" She asked incredulously, leveraging the tarpaulin to a much more comfortable position as they moved toward the nearby alley. "Not another man, surely -- think of the scandal! You know how talkative the Academy servants are.”

" _THINK OF THE SCANDAL RIGHT NOW, SIMMONS_!!"

“I could _hardly_ ask Koenig. Why, think of the _gossip_ they'd spin! Soon enough they'd think we were like Burke and Hare, and that I was some Mary Shelley-esque mad scientist trying to make _monsters_ -”

Fitz scoffed. As if she could goad him with talk of that penny dreadful! He guided them away from the gaslights and into the shadows, toward the near entrance of the Royal Shield Academy stables, with their cold-cellar beneath the floor.

"... though I _did_ always sympathize with-"

He cut in as they entered the small stable garet, suddenly unable to stop himself. " _Honestly_ , people should know electrical impulses cannot bring back the long dead. I have a theory about heart-stopping though, if there were _just_ the right amount of current -"

"That's the spirit, Fitz!" Simmons declared, clattering loudly into the cellar behind him. As soon as they’d set the body down, she threw herself into his arms and wreathed her hands around his neck, her fingers carding through his curls. He pulled her tight, and whirled around, pressing her bodily against the raw timber frame as she drew his face to hers and kissed him soundly, her pillowy lips parting against his urgent, seeking tongue.

After a long moment of kissing and petting, his soiled shirt forgotten on the floor beside her discarded bonnet, he suddenly realized, “Egads, _the corpse_!” He cried out, spinning around in horror.

"What? He won’t mind!" Jemma exclaimed after Fitz’s trundling form, quickly gathering his forgotten clothing items and stealing up the cellar steps after him. " _Fitz_! Don't run! They'll think there was something untoward happening!"

“ _YOUR FATHER IS A CABINET MEMBER, JEMMA!_ ” he half-shouted, half-hissed, retreating into the dorms at a trot. He paused at his door, staring at her droopy shoulders across the courtyard, and then, sullenly, called, “...are you going to follow or what, Mr. Burke?”

Jemma sprinted forward, armfulls of skirts held high above her ankles as she reached him. She pressed to her tiptoes, and laid three soft kisses against his cheek. “By God, I am. I’ll follow wherever you dare lead, Mr. Hare.”


End file.
